#sparklingspice

August 1983  

It’s been the kind of summer to make Stan wish he were more of a diarist. The days since his birthday have best in a fever dream of movie theatres, summer reading done outside while Boris lays beneath a tree, half talking to himself, half to Stan. His book, secondhand, has a line underlined when it comes to him that he freezes on and highlights in his own hand.  Would that it  were  always like this; always alone, always summer.  

 He’s passed his days with the lot of them haunting the few places in town they can all stand, and with his lips still tingling with kisses from a boy who, in the absence of a locker, has been looking for increasingly stranger places to hide his love notes.

Once, Stan found one slipped through his cracked window, another tucked delicately in the lilac bush outside his house ( ‘you’re lucky my mom didn’t find that, you know’), or the spokes of his bike. On Thursday, in July, he received nothing at all, and wonders what must have happened to it, what Icharus stunt Boris pulled that finally got the damn thing lost.

They live in a shoebox under his bed now, one he finds himself flipping through when a stone finds its way to its window, cries with the hollow, high jolt of struck glass, leaving behind the smallest dirty spot on the outside. He’s still asking himself  what  the fuck , still getting up, when a second one hits, and then a third, and frankly, that’s just excessive. He’s crossing the room, opens the window just in time for a rock to sail through the gap and skip to a halt at his feet, an unwelcome guest he’s left staring at.

“Sorry, Kolibri!” A voice from outside, one he knows well before he’s looking, brows knit in irritation, at his favorite idiotic bastard in the world. He’s standing outside, long dark coat and sunglasses over a  Star Wars  shirt Stan is sure Richie had worn a few weeks before Boris came to Derry. “Was not sure if you saw that first time, maybe you weren’t in room? Did not want to stand here wait. Anyway—will be late for party, Richard already abandoned us.”

“Just--hang on, okay? I’m not even wearing shoes.” G-d, if Boris had cracked his window, he’d be toast; his mom would never let him see the outside of that bedroom window until he was thirty, he’s sure of it.  

“Hurry up! My patience is thin, Kolibri!” Stan’s laughing as he shuts the window, leaving Boris to wait for him below. There’s something depressing about an out-of-summer party, one that makes him just a little melancholy as he throws on his favorite windbreaker. Like New Years, behind all the mirth, he wonders if there isn’t some screaming fear of endings, of knowing that this time next year, everyone but him will be packing up for college or whatever else they do with themselves.  

He zips himself up, kisses his mother goodbye and promises not to do anything too crazy—suddenly grateful Boris hadn’t had the idea to knock at the door—and has one moment, when he’s almost to the door, that gives him pause.  

“Can I—stay with Richie tonight?” It’s a funny way of asking to end up in a room with the Soviet flag on the wall and candy wrappers stuffed into forgotten corners, and a plant its owner delusionally thinks is still alive, but it’s one Andrea will accept.

“Did Maggie say he could?”

“Yeah,” he’s got something of an open invitation, after the way her most recent addition apparently makes it sound like the moon lives in his hands, and the years spent killing time with her extant son. “It’s just—closer to the Denbroughs from here, and I don’t want to be riding too late, you know?”  

Andrea Uris doesn’t look like a woman who expects her son to run off and neck a Soviet punk, and when she smiles at him, he knows he’s won. “You’re a good boy, Stanley. Call me in the morning.”

As his feet carry him around the back to his bike, the thought still follows him, fog creeping in on a chill morning before the sun can burn it away. This is the last time they’ll all be together like this, and the last chance they have to be carefree and crazy before he’s cramming for the SAT’s and his friends are deciding what their future is going to look like.

He looks at Boris—Boris, who is seven months into seventeen, who will be leaving, he supposes, when Richie does—and realizes, definitively, that he does need this party.  He wants to feel just happy and half-crazy enough to forget about the sadness, forget the way time keeps coming, tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

“Was waiting years, Kolibri, party will be over and we’ll be dead from old age by time we get there,” Boris, leaning against the wall by his bicycle, is complaining.

“You could’ve met me there, idiot.”  

“You are more fun to share bicycle with than Richard.”

Stan’s biting his lip to keep from smiling as he mounts. “Why’s that?”

Boris shrugs, and follows suit. “You’re prettier,” and just like that he’s leaning against Stanley’s back, arms hooked around him to keep from falling. He swears, if Boris had said something like that while he was moving, he’d have fallen off the damn thing, spilled them both to the pavement.

“Yeah, I’d hope you think that.”

--

Outside Bill’s house, they’re alone in the back, and when Stan gets off the bike, a hand catches his wrist. Stan whirls, momentum pulling him a step closer to Boris, the cosmos creeping in around them, making the world a little smaller. “Were tense, Kolibri,” dark eyes are searching his face now. “In shoulders, when we got on.” Boris doesn’t as questions often—but he sees things, knows the way Stan operates, has a thousand little ways of saying  I see you, I care , without ever putting the words, naked and raw, out there.

“Everything’s fine,” he says, in a practiced way that’s so much easier from saying ‘my mind finds ways to twist everything up, nothing happened to upset me, can we just move on?’.

Boris’s wrist pulls forward just a bit, and his other hand finds its way around to Stan’s back. “Is going to be a good night, eh?” His voice is low, eyes dark and light at once, and Stan understands in those eyes how the world outside atmosphere can be at once both vast and claustrophobic, because the way Boris looks at him expands and contracts the air itself sometimes. When Stanley gives a nod, Boris’s shoulders relax a bit. The hand on his back leaves, though the ghost of its heat sticks around a while longer, long enough for the hand to reach his face, and for Boris to press a kiss, brief and soft, against his lips.

“Good,” he’s pulling away and Stan can feel that racing, erratic thing in his chest melting down, warm and waxy and filling him up with something to fill the hollow spaces worry likes to live.  

By the time they get inside, Stan’s shoes politely left at the door, Boris’s bag slung off his shoulder, he can see they’re the last ones there, and he almost doesn’t mind. Something feels right, going from a private moment with a boy he’d rather not share, to a room filled with the people in the world he loves most, twin snapshots of the things that keep him pulling himself out of bed, one foot after the other when the landscape inside his skull turns grey, what makes him take a shower and face the day when it is wracked with storms and the world could blow itself upside down.

“T-take your shoes off, you animal,” Bill’s outstretched arm halts Boris, already taking flight in some unreadable direction, and Boris’s eyes are rolling as he’s saying something in—not Russian, Stan’s learned what that sounds like by now—another language, complaining how long it takes to unlace his boots.

“Your b-brother’s here,” Bill says, monotone, over his shoulder with a glance in Richie’s direction.  

“Be of good cheer, Billy, I brought gifts,” Boris complains, digging through his bag. When he rises, he’s got a bottle of Absolut and a bag full of cheez-balls (a combination Stan has seen him claim to be ‘lunch’ before, and had felt his soul leave his body and come back in time to explain to him that no, in no universe is that  lunch , Boris) “Is no way to be gracious host,” he clucks his tongue.  

Bill’s green eyes are fixed on the bottle, and as he licks his lips in a moment’s hesitation—Stan imagines it a batter in his head of having real drinks, versus the trouble he’ll be in if his parents come home to the aftermath of Boris Pavlikovsky and a gaggle of lightweights (plus Beverly), but he finally decides with a sigh, pinching the bridge of his nose.  

“Just—t-take  it when you go, okay? If my m-mother f-finds it, I’m—”

“HA,” Boris always seems to laugh like he punches, all guttural and erratic, like he could punch holes in the sky and make new stars from the force of it, “she kills you, you are dead boy, I hear you,” Boris says with a wave of his hand, carrying his offerings to the coffee table with the dutifulness of some ancient priest. For all their rivalry, and all the times Bill has said, in a low voice that if he weren’t Richie’s brother he’d tell people to  stay away , Stan prefers the pattern they’ve fallen into in the summer, a certain cool, chin-up disdain on Bill’s part and Boris laughing it away, to the wall that had been between them a few weeks ago, Bill refusing a movie to avoid seeing his face, Boris not having the energy to care.

“You came with him, huh?” Bill’s voice is quiet, glancing at Stan.

“Yeah.” Terse reply.

“Look--”

“Bill, don’t. We’ve been through this.”

He’s peeling off to the corner of the couch, yet unpopulated, and Bill is casting a shadow next to the arm of it. “I j-just,” he crosses his arms, sighing. “I j-just want you to b-be c-careful.” That’s what he hates most of all about this. He feels like a fucking child every time this happens, like Bill’s some kindergarten teacher telling him not to eat poison ivy. He has so much of this in his life he could scream for years and not be quite over it.

“Careful? Bill, I shared a bike with him, I didn’t shoot heroin.” He feels himself getting hotter, unzipping his windbreaker for something to do with his hands. “Look, we’ve been here before. I can take care of myself, and I can judge when someone’s bad news. I do it every fucking day here.”

“I know that,” Bill’s biting his lip, eyes faraway.

“So we can fight about it again, or we can call it a truce.” He’s calling it now, Bill doesn’t want to fight him, any more than he wants it.

“Yeah.” He swallows. “I’ll l-leave it.”  

Stan nods a little thank you, and as Bill walks away, he tells himself its progress.

He supposes it’s Eddie that brokered the cold peace that got them to this point, because people Eddie liked couldn’t be totally ignored, at least not where Bill was concerned. It wasn’t like the time Boris and Beverly had spent last Thanksgiving break wandering the graveyard in town, sharing a joint and Bill had turned white as a sheet, then the color of lunch-room flavorless apples, vermillion and dead inside. Eddie, who was still small for his age, who Boris praised for being angry and mouthy, had been an accidental olive branch, one that kept Stan from dreading any interaction between them. Stan had felt like John goddamn Lennon for a week, and if he has to go that again, he thinks he’s going to explode.

He has some naïve part of him that wishes Bill could know about the thing  they had between them, talks about literature, stolen kisses, the way Boris’s hands ran through his hair when the rest of the world was too  much and his brain was running itself through a shredder, about the hummingbird cards. He wishes Bill could realize that Stan wasn’t being pulled down, that Boris wasn’t some charity project either. This thing they had put wind between both their wings, and he didn’t think a person who understood that could hate it.

But telling him that would be a risk he wouldn’t take with a boy who asked girls out, not in this town. Friend or no, the terror at the thought was enough that he needed to fill the silence.

“Hey—” the idea feels like an attempt for air. “Bill, can we put a record on or something?” Maybe he needs something to ask him, to clear the air. He’d called a truce, but the olive branch comes now.

“I brought a few,” Ben’s eyes light up, and the enthusiasm washes away some of what residue collected in Stan’s head before.

“Yeah,” Bill perked up some, now that he’s not looking at Boris, who’s perched on the floor near Stan’s feet, handful of pretzels fisted in one hand, cup full of Squirt to spike in the other. “Go for it.”

“Oh, C’mon, don’t let him pick it,” Richie’s already complaining before Ben’s even standing up all the way.  

“If he plays Bonnie Fucking Tyler again, I’m going to actually choke myself with a redvine,” Eddie, whose complaint is swarmed on at once by three parallel attacks that send Stan into a tailspin.

“Hey, Eddie, I choked your mom with my red vine last night!”—Richie—“Bonnie Fucking Tyler owns me right now, Ben, do it!”—Beverly—“Come on, guys, it’s just a record”—Mike. Stan is laughing, though he swears he’s trying to keep it quiet.  

What the hell, he thinks. This is the right moment for it. He takes a plastic, shitty cup and pours orange soda into it, splashes the tracest hit of vodka on top. He isn’t a happy drunk, but a little buzz can make him light—Kolibri, you go from nervous shaking to floating, he thinks he remembers.

“Sputnik, back me up, ballads suck ass!” Eddie’s looking over, but Boris is shaking his head with enough enthusiasm that Stanley has to move his legs to avoid it smacking against his knees.

“She is good singer! Reminds me of Alla Pugacheva! Brings force into her music, sounds like she has seen shit.” He springs to his feet, like his spine’s not fully, pointing a finger at Ben, “Play her song and I will give you good weed—got from girl at townhouse, says is good shit from Canada.”

Ben’s nose crinkles. “Uh. Yeah, don’t. I’m gonna—play it.”

By the time Bonnie gets to Total Eclipse of the heart, Boris has pulled Beverly, also in the throes of triumph and cheer beer, to her feet. Richie and Eddie have skulked to the couch, going on about something, Mike, Bill and Ben half-watching the madness that has Stan transfixed. If only for the drink in their veins, Bev and Boris hadn’t been lying about their strange, cult-fawning commitment to Bonnie Tyler, enchanted by something powerful and ridiculous in the center of the room.

He's got her hands wrapped in both of his, and while Bonnie Tyler's wails hit critical volume, they're spinning, heads tipped back, an alternating swatches of black and orange as, worse and worse, sometimes high and scratchy, sometimes low and distorted by laughter that punches from his throat, it shakes the walls, "NOTHING I CAN SAY, TO-TAL ECLIPSE OF THE HEART," As the words fade out they collapse inward on each other, Beverly's green eyes leaking their lack of breath across cheeks splotched, she flops forward onto Boris, chin resting on a shoulder shaking so hard he can't be much of a comfort. They try to pull away a few times, but then one of them starts the impression again, or they meet eyes too long and they're gasping again, until finally they're each tumbling back in opposite directions. Boris's frame careens backward, and when he crashes at last, toppling to the couch, he is so close to Stan that he's practically on his lap, swinging a long leg over both of Stan's.  

"You guys can't fucking sing!" Eddie, cutting over the next song as they try and pull away, twin shouts of "FUCK YOU," chorusing, splitting off for Boris to add " KROLIK, " because Eddie Kaspbrak may never have been more aptly named in his life than by the Polish word for Bunny Rabbit

“Fuck you more!” He shoves Boris, whose shaggy head had been increasingly invading his personal space. Boris rams his head into Eddie’s shoulder, and with enough leverage from his leg, Eddie tips the lanky body oozing onto him, cackling, from the couch to the floor.

“Oh my god, I’m changing the record,” Mike, getting up from the Chaise lounge he’d been sharing with Bill, who seemed immediately displaced and too small in it alone, rolls his eyes. The volume goes down for a moment, and the record stops. When Mike comes back, the volume’s low enough to hear Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and his own thoughts at once.

When Boris gets up, he shifts, that he’s leaning against Stan now. “You are stuck with me, Kolibri. Krolik is barbarian.” He’s grinning at him, and Stan exhales through his nose, a choppy half-laugh.  

“Guess I’ll have to deal with you.” He wouldn’t mind being stuck with Boris Pavlikovsky sitting practically on his lap, head draped over his shoulder, for the rest of his life, he thinks. With Eddie and Richie practically committing double homicide on each other next to them, it doesn’t look suspect, and for the moment, Stan feels like two spheres of his world are crossing paths. He can have Boris and Richie and Ben and Mike and Bill and Beverly and Eddie all at once, and it feels fucking golden, like he could laugh or cry at the thought. He was so tired of cutting himself into pieces for the right people, that he’d forgotten how good it felt to be even a larger fraction of himself at once, than he was with his parents, than he was at school, or at his lame summer job at the corner store.

“I’m fucking bored, I wanna do so something.” Eddie’s reeling, he figures, from the three store-bought cookies he crammed into himself to cope with Bonnie Tyler, and the vodka-cola he washed it down with.

“I could do something.” Mike, next to Bill, looks up from whatever Bill had been showing him in his notebook. “But--what?”  

Now they’re sitting there with a problem Stan had seen coming when Ben brought up the idea of trying to have a party back in May (aside from it taking the lot of them three months until someone’s parents finally went out of town); there they were, seven people who never got invited to much of anything, and one who had done everything once, trying to play normal.  

“Hey, Sputnik,” Richie calls over Eddie’s head. “What do teenagers do in Mother Russia?”

“Fuck me if I know,” Boris says in reply. “Was  seven  last time I was there. Eight for Ukraine.”

“He lets you call him that?” Ben scowls a moment.

“Why not? Call him a bird,” he says, and he probably means to gesture to Stanley, but his hand ends up flopping inelegantly against Stan’s chest, almost making him cough. “Can be spacheship if you want me to be spaceship.”

“Asshole,” he pushes his shoulder forward a little, shut enough to jostle Boris. “Okay so—what do they do in Vegas?” He asked, figuring that’s at least a fair question, and that he’s asking it to the one person with an interesting answer.

“That, you don’t want to know.” He says, looking at Stanley, voice inflected and animated. “No good in Maine. Everyone are squares here! Do not know what you people do for fun," hands raised in the air, "promised Billy no dropping acid,” the way Boris waves at him, and Bill’s eyeroll informs Stan that no such conversation had happened. “What do you do? Spin bottle?"  

Ben's relief from a moment ago turned to the look of a boy leaving his body.  

"We c-can't p-play  spin the bottle,  Boris, you n-need more--" Bill swallowed, face looking more and more like a pail of milk, " girls ."  

Richie, on Boris's other side, tensed in a way Stan thought he might have imagined. Boris's head tilts towards him for just a moment, then back to Bill, standing once, leaving Stan's lap a little colder. "What, Billy, don't want to kiss me? You break my heart."

“Nah, he’s right,” Bev says,  crouched cozied against the wall near Ben in the armchair. “We’d definitely need more girls,” she says, a suggestive raise of her brows.

They don’t play spin the bottle. They don’t play scrabble, either, because Stan knows French and Boris knows a fuckload, and they’re both dirty, rotten cheaters, so insist Eddie and Richie. They don’t dance, because  Total Eclipse of the Heart  had nearly broken a lamp via flying limb.

“Can’t we just watch a movie?”

What they settle on is watching  Poltergeist , which some of them—Bill, Mike, Boris, Stan himself—love, some of them—Ben, Bev, Richie—jumping every ten seconds, and Eddie paradoxically angered by (people in horror movies are idiots, apparently, they’re never doing what you should do when you’re in danger, like he would know).

When it’s over, he is laying on the floor, in a long, ambling debate with Mike and Boris about ghosts. The vodka has worn off—he probably had a third of what people shoot when they drink for real—and its tiredness and teenage madness fueling him now. None of them believe, but they all think they know exactly what they’d do if one manifested here and now, from finding out the haunting’s source—Mike—burning the premises down—Boris—to fucking moving somewhere not haunted—himself, they spin around and around, calling bullshit on all of these stupid, stupid plans.

--

Boris and Stan leave a bit before Richie does, because Eddie doesn’t have a chance in hell of being allowed to stay over, and Stan knew well enough why Richie wants to make it last.

“I was right,” Boris says, discarding his coat on the chair by his desk. Stan’s blanking at first, and when he can even consider what Boris might mean, he’s back on the floor in his mind, with ghosts and solutions and whether you can run from something forever, all still swirling about.

“No you weren’t,” he insists, laying back on Boris’s bed. “Mike had a point. If the ghost isn’t tied to the literal walls, you can’t just commit arson until it goes away.”

“HA!” That laugh, paired with a smile that makes him seem less, rather than more sharp, for once, despite the alinear, almost sharky way his teeth lie in his mouth. “Not about that, Kolibri. Before that—told you it would be good night, remember?” He’s kicked off his shoes finally, left sunglasses and gloves with the fingers cut out on his dresser.

“Oh.” He says, “that,” as Boris jumps onto the bed, giving it a bounce that feels like the earth’s shaking. Were he not so skinny, he’d have crashed into Stan.

“ Oh ,” Boris copies his tone, “ that ,” with a hint of mocking. He learns his head forward, presses a kiss to the side of Stan’s face. “Well?” After a pause. “Was I not?”

“Yeah.” Stan pulls himself closer on the bed—twin sized, but suited enough for two boys who have no desire to respect personal space—letting one arm drape over Boris’s waist. “You win.”

“I am always winner, Kolibri,” he says, wolfish in the low, silver sheen of the waxing gibbous outside. His hand comes to cup Stanley’s face as it had at golden hour, but this time, the kiss is long, and lingering, and Stan is leaning into it, nibbling at his bottom lip.

Any time they pull away they find their way back to one another, gravity not letting them float far. Sometime, after time escapes them both, Stan finds himself, hands on Boris’s shoulder and side, moving himself on top of him, the pair of them pressed together, chest to chest.

A tile of dark clothing wrapped around a rail of a boy drops into the seat next to him. It’s the first pair discussion that hasn’t filled Stan with dread since September. In the sole class he has without a single friend in it, the prospect of talking literature with people who would shove or strike or stare right through him if they could, has never appealed. Sulky, with unsettling dark eyes, and an air of gloom he’s only heard discussed in a low voice once or twice, Boris  Pavlikovsky  is the best Stan could hope for in a paired discussion.  

He looks like he’s killed a man, and Richie wasn’t sure he hadn’t, but he’s yet to call him anything technically classed as hate speech. He’ll take his chances, he supposes. He was a loser, and people had to take a chance on him, too, at the end of the day.  Put into the world what you want out of it,  and all those things that feel wise when no one is making it hard come to mind.  

It’s the kid’s first day, his book so new he can barely have cracked it open. “Odyssey.” His voice is disarming, an accent Stan can’t place, and it has a bounce to it that makes him want to hear more as he continues. “Is Greek gods and men with swords, yes?”  

He supposes helping the kid catch up isn’t the worst way this could have gone. “Yeah,” he says. “It’s--uh, after the Trojan war.”  

Boris nods, thinking a moment. “Know a little about Greek gods. Read books about it in New Guinea.” Stan doesn’t have time to ask about that, because his face is changing, sharp brows  raised  and he leans forward from his slouch.  

“In English, you have word, ‘panic,’ yes ?”-- Stan nods, but Boris is already on a roll--“Is Greek word. Or was. Used to believe their goat-god Pan would creep along forest and leap out at you.” He pauses  onl  for a second, and when he speaks  again  he lurches forward a little. “Wah!”  

Stan feels  really stupid  for the jump he makes, and he should have seen it coming. Despite himself, he’s laughing through the start, and Boris’s wan face has cracked a smile, reaching his dark eyes and giving them a shine that makes him seem less like a knife.  

“Pan can leave me the hell alone.”  

Boris nods. “You seem nervous. You shake like  k olibri .” Stan can’t, for the life of him, guess what that is, but he’s imagining a chihuahua or a leaf or something nervously vibrating through its fragile life. Fair enough, he supposes. “Whatever is scaring you, make it think you can bite deeper. Punch harder.”  

“I don’t think that’s my—uh, skillset.”  

A shrug. “Doesn’t have to be true. Just have to stand up tall enough.” A beat as he looks at his own slouch, feat dripping from the edge of the chair, back barely touching anything. He’s as close to supine as a person can be in a school chair. “Or whatever’s scary.”  

Stan smiles a little at that again. He’s the weirdest person he’s ever met, and Stan understands, now, why Captain Kirk approaches each new planet of aliens with a wonder and curiosity, rather than sinking away or bracing for a blow. Whatever distant star breathed Boris  Pavlikovsky  into his orbit, he wants to wish on it, ask if to keep them in this strange little moment.  

“So,” he clears his throat. “Do you, uh, know the Trojan war? This is after it. Odysseus is trying to get home.”  

“I know Trojan war,” Boris nods. “King of Greece had tiny prick. His woman got sick of it and went away. Instead of drinking or kicking other man’s kneecaps himself, he starts war.” A snort. “Stupid man. Plenty of other women with lower standards out there.”  

In this manner, AP English, one a slog of a dead-eyed teacher and students just as unmotivated became something Stan looked forward to.  

He caught himself counting down the minutes through algebra, shuffling quicker through the hallways, knowing when he came through those doors, he had a seat saved, Boris’s beaten-up backpack with a smattering of keychains thrown into the seat next to him, while he cleaned his nails with a pencil, or doodling in his books. Hummingbirds, and hammers-and-sickles, and notes in Cyrillic, strange birds (Stan wants so badly to ask about them), pairs of glasses, pills, cigarettes and half-finished figures with curly hair, letters that could be initials or something from his brain.  

“Kolibri,” the greeting is always the same, the slack form of a boy perking up some, dragging his backpack from the chair. Stan wonders if he even remembers his name, because he uses nothing else but Kolibri.  

When he asked that it meant, Boris simply gestured. “Is what you are,” he says. “Don’t know word in English,” he confesses by way of explanation. Stan’s face must read more legibly than he likes, because Boris told me once, “Don’t worry, is good thing. They’re cute little fuckers.”  

He feels his face turn its heat dials up, and never asks what it means again, not sure he can hear the word ‘cute’ from his lips again and survive the blow.  

As the weeks ticked by, Stan might have expected the pull he had to lessen, for something ordinary to pull away the almost magical veneer he carried. Even if Boris didn’t make him  laugh, or  say things that would stick in his mind at night, or light up any time Stan brought his own thoughts to their stolen back-of-class conversations, it wouldn’t have been true. The more they learned about one another, the tighter the pull between them became.  

Boris, in so many ways, was a baffling creature, one Stan would never have sought. He did homework in class, ten minutes before he handed in crumpled paper next to Stan’s neat, paper-clipped stacks. He was crass, words Stan’s mother would wash his mouth for passing his lips daily. He was a communist, or something like it, which scandalized Stan more than he would have guessed. On one memorable Socratic seminar, he had railed against systems that made people poor, made families property, ruined the earth—he’d dragged out a beaten copy of Thoreau to prove a point.  

Stan found himself backing it—after all, if he learned one thing from his father, it was that everything should be questioned, examined, considered. He went down these rabbit holes to enthusiastic prodding from Boris, and the more they were paired, the more the two of them took schoolbooks to a level where they almost felt real.  It became a time to leave his shell, and Boris let him get out of his head and into a moment, private despite a class full of people who didn’t get either of them. Mrs.  Aernis  gave up on separating them, since Boris didn’t shout with Stan to contain him, and Stan didn’t melt into the wall with Boris to encourage him.  

It wasn’t until a rainy presentation day, that he realized it went both ways. He watched Boris’s eyes light up when Stan presented on the reason the Odyssey proved that people shouldn’t have an endgame, that Ithaca would be changed without him after years of chasing, that living life with an end in mine can stifle the moment and create sea monsters and storms where they weren’t. Boris had sat there, lips slightly parted, and staring at him like Galileo at Saturn’s rings, and Stan stumbles over his conclusion, once he notices.  

--  

He starts finding notes slipped into his locker. Postcards, each other a photo of a hummingbird on them, scrawled with something random each time.  

The first one has a quote from the Odyssey on it, in a sharp hand that  he’s seen in notes passed in the middle of droning conversations, inane things said by classmates neither of them will bother listening to .  It’s a hand that learned to write in a different alphabet, that knew what it was doing, but still had the character of a tongue far away.  

The next, simply “This is  kolibri .  Your word for it is stupid,” with a word (kolibri?) in cyrillic, and an arrow to the front side. It makes Stan’s heart lurch a little.  

Cute little fuckers.  Boris knew he liked to watch birds, and  all of  those hummingbirds in his notebook flashed before Stan’s eyes. Stan would never  guess that Boris  Pavlikovsky  thought about him half so much as he haunted Stanley Uris when he wasn’t there .  But Boris, with his hummingbirds and postcards, had been braver about it than Stanley would have dared. Derry isn’t a place where you can give away too much about yourself. He’s spent ages worrying that someone will somehow see the way his heart speeds up when Boris hands him a note, that if he just gets too close, they’ll both end up bloodied.  

This note shows an abandon, a lack of fear that he wishes he could take into himself.  

The notes keep coming, sometimes quotes from Tolstoy with translations by hands, sometimes the lyric to a song, sometimes something absurd. Without fail, every Thursday, Stan has a new bird.  

--  

Somehow, Room 211 became its own little world. Outside of it, Stan could count the ways they interacted on one hand, for all the times they spoke for an hour he wished would never end.  

At lunch, they shared glances across the  lunch room , where Boris sat slumped in a corner, thick volume in Russian on his lap, while Stanley  sat with the Losers, thread between eyes cut eventually, by something absurd from Richie’s mouth, making him laugh.  

It was the same in the library, catching a glimpse of black hair to match an oversized blazer, and he always wants to catch him, say something, but he’s held back once, Bill softly whispering how weird that guy is, what a bad feeling he gives him, that he’s probably bad news. Stan loses the nerve to approach him where people might see.  

There was one trick of Fate, or some  maniuplator  of circumstance, that turned the winds, and blew Stan and Boris to one another and away from the schoolbuilding.  

One day, Stan’s caught between   Hockstetter  and the wall of his locker, timing working against him in a busy hallway after the final bell of the day. In what could have been ugly, there’s a thin body rushing in, grabbing  Hockstetter’s  hand by the wrist as it was raised, pulling it back and around until the boy crumples, a near-miss  with a fractured femur. Stan will have dreams about it going differently, imagining the snap, maybe a spurt of blood. The way Boris had moved showed an ease in the art of force that chilled him, but gave him feelings he would admit only to his dirtied bedsheets.  

“Told you, Kolibri. Don’t have to be big. Just scary,” he’s almost smiling, eyes a little wild with confidence and something darker. “You hurt?”  

Stan shakes his head. He’s a little shaken, more by this wisp of a boy’s strike taking down someone who had seemed, in the moment, a giant. “I’m good.”  

“Good.” A comforting arm around his shoulder. “You want ice cream, Kolibri? You need ice cream.”  

“Yeah. Yeah, I do.”  

He didn’t think, when he agreed, that Boris would be stuffing a box of  klondikes  under the side of his shirt, throwing in a few bottles of beer liberated from their box, and strolling out of the corner store like it was nothing. His long fingers were light, slighting everything free from the kinds of things that set off alarms.  

“You’re not going to—pay for those?”  

He laughs, head tossing back, and claps Stan on the back. “Kolibri, life is hell. Is bad enough without paying capitalist pigs for simple pleasures, eh?”  

Stan’s brows knit. “But--what if we get caught? Do you know what kind of trouble we’ll be in?” He’s more afraid of Boris, tenuous and aloof, going down, than he is upset at a few loose ice cream bars or bottles. Even so, the anxiety knots his stomach, he’s already seeing Boris in handcuffs, knowing he’ll talk back to the officers, knowing they will hurt him for that, for his foreign accent, for the whispers that he’s a freak. He knows the  Toziers  have a connection to him, that they’ll be called, and for all Maggie’s goodness, she’ll have no idea what to do.  

Boris takes hold of both Stan’s shoulders, looks him level in the eye. “Kolibri, will be fine. Can take care of myself. If things go wrong, drop goods and leave. Can replace them.”  

Stan’s breathing is uneasy, and he nods, but if he’s convincing at all, Boris is all the wiser.  

“Nothing will happen to you, yeah?  I know what to do.”  

Stan doesn’t have the words to say that it isn’t himself he worries for. But he puts his faith in this boy, who had nearly broken a bone to save him.  

He doesn’t tell his mom that  the  boy he brought home smokes, that there’s stolen beer in his backpack, that he’s not a virgin and has said so at more than one turn. In fact, as far as Mrs. Uris knows, Boris is a foreign exchange student from the Ukraine, who absolutely loves America.  

He’s gracious enough, however. The warm food on the table he  savours  and compliments, skinny body packing away second helpings of everything, keeps his head bowed through Rabbi Uris’s prayer before eating, smiles at landscapes on the wall and talks about the time he’d seen the same beach in Australia that decorated the sitting room.  

In Stan’s bedroom, Boris cracks open the beers, and Stan doesn’t have the heart to tell him it’s his first. It tastes like plastic and bread, but after a few sips, the aftertaste is almost spicy. He wants to throw up, and he wants to have ten more.  

They were open, in the way only people with nothing to lose could be.  “My dad still hasn’t forgiven me for my Bar Mitzvah speech,” he found it spilling out. “We’re close, don’t get me wrong. I love him, but I think—he'll never get over the being the Rabbi whose son dropped his mic and saying ‘fuck’ in front of a whole congregation.” A wry smile. “Most badass I’ve ever felt.”  

“You’re not your father. Could not be. Don’t beat yourself so much for it—is probably good thing.”  

“I doubt he agrees.”  

A shrug. “If he forgives, accepts even what he doesn’t get? Is good father. If not? To hell with him.”  

Stan thinks for a moment. “I guess he will. He’s weird about stuff, but he’s not angry. I can’t remember being yelled at in the past year.” He sees Boris smile, a little sad, and a hand reaches over, briefly cuffing Stan’s shoulder.  

“Good man, then. You are lucky.”  

“I guess. I mean, he’s my dad.” A shrug. “He should, you know?” Stan knew there were bad parents in the world—knew people who lived with them daily. He’d never particularly questioned what it was he had, the ways he could be lacking.  “You know?” Boris is in thought for a moment, eyes cast down to his third ice cream sandwich.  

“My dad’s in Australia. Or was, last I knew.”  

“When does he get back?”  

“Back? Is no ‘back,’ Kolibri. Ditched him in Vegas.  Big fight,  almost died. Everything else went to shit.” He shakes his head. “Got brought here by social worker. Ward of state,” he raises his fingers in quotes. Boris says nothing more about it, and his voice is flatter than he has ever heard it.  Emotionless, almost, the way he talks about the plot of movies he watched years ago, he shrugs away his own scars.  

Stan realized, though he couldn’t articulate at the time; he wasn’t lucky, because everyone should have a family who, despite whatever ways they broke apart or didn’t grasp one another, pulled one another up, not tearing them down. People needed someone to go home to, not shrink from.  

“Fuck.” His heart’s going faster. “I’m sorry. Oh god.”  

“Life. Is what it is, huh?” Boris takes a huge bite of his sweet, cheeks bulging with effort to hold it all as he chews. “By the way, Kolibri, is silent as grave  in  here . What music you like?”  

“I have a lot. I try and switch it up, you know?”  

“What,” he swallows, clearer afterwards, “is favorite today?”  

Stan plays a record for him, and they lay on the floor of his bedroom listening. As Stan explains his favorite song, a hand reaches out,  slopply  taking his as the singer croons feeling like Jesus’ son on heroin.  

“I’ve taken hit before. Am more of an upper kind of man. Cocaine maybe.”  

“You take drugs?” Stan raises his head above the floor to look over him.  

“When I have some to spare. More useful to sell, though. Everyone is best friend. Is why it was a shame to twist the arm of Hockstetter.” He’s looking at the ceiling, free hand reaching for his beer, taking a drink.  

“So why did you do it?”